Bob and Teresa Almond lived in their home in the Alabama town of Woodland for 27 years, raising children and running a business there. Their modest dream of comfortable retirement in the house, supplemented by money from chickens they raised on the property, came crashing down on Jan. 31, 2018. That day, Randolph County Drug Task Force raided their home \u2014 supposedly on the basis of smelling cannabis.<\/p>\n
A poignant profile of their case appears on the website of a Montgomery-based social advocacy organization, the\u00a0Alabama Appleseed Center for Law & Justice<\/a>. As Appleseed researcher Leah Nelson relates, Teresa Almond, a\u00a049-year-old grandmother, is still traumatized. She now spends at least part of her days sitting under the shelter of a relative\u2019s garage, armed with a gun and afraid that the deputies will return.<\/p>\n The raid came after a sheriff\u2019s deputy said he detected the smell of cannabis coming from the house. On no notice, the task force broke down the door, set off a flashbang grenade and ordered the Almonds to the floor at gunpoint. Then, they ransacked the house. In addition to the estimated $50 worth of cannabis, the task force found a single pill of Lunesta<\/a>, a prescription sleep aid. This was deemed illegal because the pill was not inside the bottle that was printed with Greg\u2019s name, clearly indicating it was his prescription.<\/p>\n Deputies handcuffed the Almonds and booked them into the Randolph County jail, where they were charged with second-degree marijuana possession, a misdemeanor, and felony possession of a controlled substance, because the Lunesta pill was not in its original packaging. The couple spent the night in jail, despite the fact that neither of them had even been arrested before.<\/p>\n While the Almonds spent the night in jail, law enforcement began to seize the couple\u2019s property: Greg\u2019s gun collection, a chainsaw, antique guitars, a coin collection, Teresa\u2019s wedding rings, and about $8,000 in cash the couple kept in safes in the back of the house, according to the Appleseed Center. They also lost their dog when officers left their doors unsecured, allowing the pet to escape. <\/p>\n Ultimately, the felony charge was rejected by a grand jury. The misdemeanor cannabis charge is still pending. The Almonds say their adult son, who was living in the house at the time, told officers that he owned the cannabis and his parents didn\u2019t know it was there. The couple have, in turn,\u00a0filed a case against county authorities<\/a>\u00a0which asserts that their civil rights were violated, and that authorities failed to demonstrate how the seized property had any connection to criminal activity.<\/p>\n The case has sparked outrage locally, even if it has failed to win much national attention.\u00a0Alabama Political Reporter<\/a> editorializes: \u201cCivil asset forfeiture destroyed the Almonds. Specifically, Alabama\u2019s ridiculously broad and downright unconstitutional civil asset forfeiture laws, which allow Alabama cops to seize property even though citizens are never convicted of a crime and then forces people to prove their innocence.\u201d<\/p>\n As the Appleseed Center states, civil asset forfeiture can mean big bucks for local police forces. Alabama does not track or made public its income from forfeitures \u2014 although prosecutors have pledged to create a public database in response to activist pressure. <\/p>\n Last year, the Appleseed Center joined with the\u00a0Southern Poverty Law Center<\/a>\u00a0to review some 70 percent of civil asset forfeiture cases filed by the state in 2015. The\u00a0resulting report revealed<\/a>\u00a0that Alabama netted nearly $2.2 million in 827 cases that year. Also that year, courts awarded law enforcement agencies 406 seized weapons, 119 vehicles, 95 electronic items and 274 other miscellaneous items, including power tools, houses and mobile homes.<\/p>\n In 18 percent of the reviewed 2015 cases in which criminal charges were filed, the charge was simple possession of cannabis and\/or paraphernalia. As the Appleseed Center points out, these are \u201ccrimes that by definition do not enrich the people who commit them.\u201d<\/p>\n The Appleseed report details how the episode has devastated the Almonds. They had recently mortgaged their property to upgrade their chicken coops. With bitter irony, they were scheduled to sign paperwork restructuring their loans on Feb. 1, 2018. They missed that appointment because they were in jail, and the house was repossessed by the bank. The couple is now living in a storage shed on the property \u2014 with a propane heater for warmth, and just a trickle of electricity from a solar panel they\u2019ve installed.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m not right,\u201d Teresa Almond admitted to reporter Nelson. \u201cI have not been right since the day it happened,\u201d she said. \u201cThat was my home. I raised all my babies in there. And my grandbabies. If my grandbabies would have been there that day, they would have hurt my grandbabies. I have nowhere to bring my babies to spend time with them. \u2018Cause this is not [an atmosphere] that I want my grandbabies in, and them remembering that we lived in a shack because of cops.\u201d<\/p>\n While it would have no impact on local police forces in places like Alabama, a bill pending on Capitol Hill does acknowledge that forfeiture abuse is a concern and would impose limits on the practice by federal authorities. The Strengthening the Tenth Amendment Through Entrusting States Act (STATES Act<\/a>), which was\u00a0recently reintroduced<\/a>, would bar federal forfeiture of any assets derived from state-legal cannabis enterprises. It would also exempt state-legal cannabis businesses from the definition of \u201cspecified proceeds of illegal activity\u201d under the federal money laundering statutes.\u00a0<\/p>\n As\u00a0National Law Review<\/a>\u00a0notes,\u00a0the STATES Act would make clear that federal asset forfeiture and money laundering laws are inapplicable to funds derived from state-legal cannabis activities. But, apart from drawing some attention to the issue of forfeiture abuse, this would mean little for states like Alabama \u2014 which has\u00a0some of the harshest cannabis laws in the country<\/a>, and not even a medical marijuana program.<\/p>\n Another question raised by the egregious Almond case is whether the mere smell of cannabis can justify search and seizure. In a win both for cannabis freedom and racial justice, Vermont\u2019s top court this January ruled in favor<\/a>\u00a0of a motorist whose car was searched and seized on the ostensible basis that a state trooper smelled pot \u2014 and the probable basis that he was African American. Gregory Zullo prevailed in state Supreme Court, which found that the \u201cfaint\u201d smell of cannabis was not enough to justify seizure of his vehicle. The case was sent back to the lower court in Rutland, where the ACLU can now argue that the police acted in \u201cbad faith\u201d and that the stop was racially motivated.<\/p>\n Unfortunately, just weeks earlier the Kansas high court\u00a0ruled for the police<\/a>\u00a0in a similar case. A divided Kansas Supreme Court upheld a cannabis conviction in a case that similarly relied on supposed olfactory evidence to justify a search. Worse, this case extended to a private home the accepted police practice in Kansas that a whiff of pot can justify the search of a vehicle. Douglas County resident Lawrence Hubbard\u2019s cannabis conviction will stand.<\/p>\n TELL US<\/strong>, have you ever had assets seized by law enforcement?<\/p>\n The post Alabama Couple Lose Longtime Home Over $50 Worth of Cannabis<\/a> appeared first on Cannabis Now<\/a>.<\/p>\n
Bob and Teresa Almond lived in their home in the Alabama town of Woodland for 27 years, raising children and running a business there. Their modest dream of comfortable retirement in the house, supplemented by money from chickens they raised on the property, came crashing down on Jan. 31, 2018.Continue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":190,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2693,50,9674,120,90,687,5245,9675],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34449"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/190"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34449"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34449\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34450,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34449\/revisions\/34450"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34449"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34449"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34449"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Lives Upended<\/h4>\n
The Forfeiture Machine<\/strong><\/h4>\n
Federal Forfeiture and the STATES\u00a0Act\u00a0<\/strong><\/h4>\n
Oooh, That Smell<\/strong><\/h4>\n
\n
\nRead More: Alabama Couple Lose Longtime Home Over Worth of Cannabis<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"